EfficientSyllabus
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User ID: 827
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It's not a disease but hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries are labeled "trans health care". The answer is of course that saying "trans health care" allows for asking for public financing of puberty blockers etc, but saying it's not a disease supposedly averts "stigma". Even though the woke seem to also advocate that mental illness and disability are not bad and shouldn't be stigmatized in the first place.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
You are setting up a circular argument. Good programmers need intelligence. By intelligence we mean whatever makes people good at programming.
This has no explanatory power.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Is the art in the arm movements or the idea, the composition, the choice of colors etc? If I memorize how to paint a Mona Lisa replica, am I as impressive as Leonardo?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I wonder if that would really suffice for them. After all, the guy may generate the image at home on his PC, then memorize it and paint it on site from memory. If this is still "A-ok", then this is a weird esthetic preference.
The difference is that a 15 year old will be 25 in 10 years, but a woman doesn't become a man (in general...). And they'd say the reason that people don't watch women's football is sexism.
It's also interesting how the popularity gap is different in different sports. At least in Hungary, women's handball and water polo are not much less popular than men's. Same with swimming. But for football/soccer the gap is enormous, approx zero care about women's football and men's is hugely popular.
Regarding not the same sport: I wonder if someone would argue that all athletes should earn the same, regardless of sport. So a volleyball player should earn the same as a football player, because they both train equally hard, and the only cause of difference in earnings is some form of bias.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Circumcision in the religious context is an initiation ritual, it's a mark of belonging to community. Initiations often contain an element of sacrifice. This can be derided as mere exploitation of the sunk cost fallacy or a way to trap people, (eg when the mafia requires that you commit a crime to enter the org, so they can be sure you won't go to the police as you'd also implicate yourself), but it can also be seen more charitably as a test of commitment, a filter for serious loyalty etc.
Circumcision can be seen as a symbolicized, minimized form of child sacrifice. Now you don't sacrifice your firstborn (who would be your main inheritor), you simply ritualistically chop a bit off of your kids most valuable part, the one that will continue your genetic lineage. It's symbolic but sort of indicates your willingness to sacrifice for the community and that you have skin in the game.
Why secular and Christian Americans do it is more complicated and circumcised people come up with a jumble of nonsense post hoc reasons. It's almost as worthless to ask them as asking single women how to be successful in dating as a man. Tons of mental stopsigns involved.
I would assume it's probably some sort of judaizing Protestant Christian influence originally.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
No, not causation. I mean correlations that will hold at test time and aren't just coincidences. Causation is a different thing.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I thought they just want to cancel the use case of training an AI to rap about tough black life in the hood while throwing about the word nigga. I believed they would be fine with I don't know an AI that explains things to blind people or summarizes news articles or generates sport news from the match records or whatever.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
In machine learning the aim is to distinguish signal from noise, to extract things that will generalize to future data, as opposed to merely coincidental, contingent things that appear in the training data. This however leads to deeply philosophical issues that some engineer types tend to ignore out of a feeling of superiority over humanities types. It's not clear for example how to distinguish real, fundamental correlations from mere happenstance. For example one may say that a female US president is perfectly possible, it's not a logical contradiction. The fact that we haven't had one is just a contingent fact about our timeline so far. Or perhaps that the fact that black people currently commit more crimes is not an inherent property to them but a happenstance based on external conditions and so on.
By the way, Saul Kripke just died a few days ago. He had a lot to say about necessity. I'm not convinced that the necessary vs contingent stuff (which goes back all the way to theological arguments) is actually all that meaningful but it's good to recognize that people have already discussed these sorts of things.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
There are all kinds of models that are in-between the two: do the triceratops thing but you can manipulate the scene, swap out objects etc. And in some sense SD also "interpolates" between its source images, just in a very complex way.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Is your gender the social expectation from you or is it your inner feeling?
Does someone who doesn't conform to "current gender norms" have a different gender then?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Well, maybe those professions are being held back then. But electrical engineers are close enough to programmers in culture, I'd say. Or at least they are in my bubble. And as for other engineers, there's less of an open culture and things are proprietary. Realistic projects can only be done on the company scale in industry, there no equivalent of free software or Github for those professions.
Also,I don't think that other professions are really as straightforward and standardized as these conversations make it seem. Programming isn't sooo unique. Generic IT admin stuff or network engineering, infrastructure design etc also has a lot of the same difficulties. And someone who mucks around their home router and built some PCs as a kid will be better at such IT work. You'll be a better car mechanic if you're in some car modding community since growing up. You'll be better at roofing, construction planning, flooring, plumbing design etc if you dive into it obsessively. People just don't do it that much for whatever reason.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I'd add reading other people's code. I picked up a lot of coding by osmosis as a kid just fumbling around existing codebases, just trying to get a program to do something I wanted. I literally had no idea what is a for loop or what are function calls, I just dived in and tweaked it. Of course it works better the more background knowledge you have. But the main point is to se real code, instead of the idealized stuff that a lot of courses teach, eg "design patterns" just for the sake of design pattern, unrealistic standards of code cleanness, like the very opinionated Clean Code etc. The best open source products from respected companies don't code like that, but get shit done. I'm not advocating for spaghetti code, just to get a taste for real, working codebases as opposed to toy examples with unrealistic elegance. By reading code you can pick up good or bad habits alike, but that's not a reason to avoid it.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Are you saying that the leftist educators (or the philosophers who came up with the justifications behind the techniques used in education) in western countries like the US intentionally want the kids to be dumber and learn less efficiently, in order to harm the country?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Try blasting the song "Nigga Nigga Nigga" as a white guy next to some wokes. I guess they'd disapprove.
(also CDs are grandfathered in, their analog predecessors were made much earlier than the current progressive morals around race).
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Sure, this is a much better argument because now you have to address the substance of who (or what, if an AI isn't a who) is allowed to utter the n-word and whether non-blacks can utter it indirectly through the operation of AI systems or whether it causes "harm" or not.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Seven years ago there were a few months when it was indeed an important topic that hundreds of thousands of migrants wanted to pass through Hungary.
I can understand that it's an important topic in Western Europe, but in Hungary it's imported and larped.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
More depinkification opportunity: the user profiles on mobile show the username in pink.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
For me, better mood from exercise is mediated through better sleep, a sense of accomplishment and being fitter in general when walking, climbing stairs, carrying things, so I feel more inclination to do things instead of just sitting on my couch.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Exactly, and specifically this means that there will be an incentive to misrepresent oneself as a woman (as identification grants access privileges). When blacks were allowed into formerly white spaces, there was no possibility or motivation for someone to misrepresent themselves.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Okay, but is there anything interesting or unusual in this aspect regarding programming? Why does this always come up when debating software dev?
My guess is that there is an abundance of otherwise low-status kids who, by virtue of spending too much time "in the basement" can punch above their weight. And that these avenues are not properly gatekept by usual prestige and status gatekeepers. Or is there some other reason?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Just use the fully general template to get better at anything.
Find the appropriate level of difficulty which is not too easy but not overwhelmingly hard that you just fail without a chance for improving. Then on that level, push your boundaries, be consciously willing to step out of the comfort zone. But also be relaxed and confident, and don't imagine the stakes as too high. You can try again later too. And evaluate your performance afterwards, think of better ways you could have acted in hindsight, imagine future situations etc.
In terms of conversation, you can probably chat with close friends. How about friends of friends who still share many interests with you? Then you can expand to more and more different people. If it works one on one, how about small groups, then bigger ones?
Also realize that most conversation is just about vibes and not content. Showing interest in whatever's ratting around in the other person's mind is the main point, as well as sharing the moment etc. A few brain farts don't matter, just don't be defensive about it, go about it gracefully. Lots of people without broad lexical knowledge can nevertheless be good conversationalist.
And to have more interesting stuff to say, you also need to do more interesting stuff. This is a bit backwards, though. It's probably more fruitful to realize that there are a lot of interesting things out there that you haven't dived into yet. Perhaps out of an ego situation, that you consider yourself above normie shit, you conceptualize your self worth in terms of your knowledge in obscure specialized stuff and so you block out the possibility that normie shit can be interesting too.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I was specifically reacting to you attributing your wife's switch to standard German to some leftist influence. I would imagine German leftists would want to distance themselves from that Prussian style rigidity that you mention.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
If I oppose you shooting a bunch of cannon balls at my house, I'm not canceling ballistics, I'm canceling your use of ballistics in this particular way.
"Cancelling" math would be something like what the Pythagoreans did (though cancel isn't the best verb) when trying to suppress the proof/discovery that root 2 isn't rational (please let's not get bogged down in the historicity of my characterization of this particular example, it's an analogy). To consider mathematical facts themselves as dangerous or harmful. These people didn't cancel machine learning or convergence proofs or gradient descent. They cancelled an application of machine learning. If I say that a Chinese style social credit system or all encompassing surveillance infrastructure are bad or should not be implemented, I'm not cancelling the math. Just the application area.
Sure, but my point is that saying "It's just a number! That's ridiculous to ban!" gets around the meat of the argument (any digital information can be encoded in binary and therefore as a number). It's lazy. Argue the substance.
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